Once a vibrant platform for artists, DeviantArt is now buckling under the weight of bots and greed—and spurning the creative community that made it great.
AI generated content is great and all but it drowns out everything else on there.
Anyone can type a prompt and generate a great looking image with a couple of attempts these days it seems.
The people spending days, weeks, months and more on a piece can't keep up.
As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I do not believe, or at least I do not wish to believe, in the absolute success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others, one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-applied developments of photography, like all other purely material developments of progress, have contributed much to the impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already so scarce. It is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled.
― Charles Baudelaire, On Photography, from The Salon of 1859
there's some stuff image generating AI just can't do yet. it just can't understand some things. a big problem seems to be referring to the picture itself, like position or its border. another problem is combining things that usually don't belong together, like a skin of sky. those are things a human artist/designer does with ease.
think of an episode of any animated series with countless handmade backgrounds, good luck generating those with any sort of consistency or accuracy and you will be calling for an artist who can actually take instructions and iterate
People spending that much time on their work can and should create things in meat space.
EDIT: This comment got some hate and in retrospect it does sound pretty snotty. No disrespect to any digital artists intended, including AI artists.
I just meant to highlight that more traditional artists can still create in meat space and newer AI artists simply cannot do that easily yet. I personally hope any artist with the ability to focus for hours and hours considers also doing meat space work. Actual tangible, 3d work can only be sold once, but can be sold for a lot. And it's cool.